Choice: Theatre

Pinter Triple Bill: A Kind of Alaska, 7pm; Collection/ Lover, 8.15pm, Donmar Warehouse, WC2 (0171-369 1732)

Praise has been flooding in for the Donmar's minor season dedicated to Harold Pinter, British theatre's major enduring talent. Praise for the actors; praise, too, for the plays which have stood the test of time with the same staunchness that Pinter himself displays as Harry, the jealous homosexual in The Collection (1961). This has been given its first pairing with The Lover (1962) under the direction of Joe Harmston: two games without frontiers, in which casual cruelties strike at the heart of sexual anxiety and desire. A Kind of Alaska, inspired by Oliver Sacks's Awakenings, makes for a suitably nerve-wrenching appetiser. Penelope Wilton is outstanding as Deborah, the 45-year-old woman who is woken by a shot of L-dopa after 29 years in a near-frozen state brought on by a teenage bout of encephalitis lethargica. Here, the famous Pinter pause isn't just a convenient marker for the pain of those lost years, it is numb horror itself.